Us

by David Nicholls

  We didn’t speak much on the sleeper train to Munich. We lay very still, stacked on shelves, in off-white cubicles of moulded plastic, wipe-clean, with ample sockets for recharging appliances. It was all very smooth and functional, but the hum of the air-conditioning and the blackness outside the window contributed to the impression that we were new inmates in some intergalactic prison cell.

  We could have flown to Italy, of course, but I wanted us – the three of us – to at least touch on Germany and Austria, and wouldn’t it be more fun, more romantic, to be a red dot sliding across that great land-locked central mass? Playing cards and drinking wine in our reasonably priced pre-booked couchette while Albie strummed his guitar and read Camus next door, then waking refreshed in Munich, a city new to all of us. There were Raphaels and Dürers at the Alte Pinakothek, Monets and Cézannes at the Neue, there was a famous Bruegel, a Turner – Connie loved Turner. We would go to the beer gardens with Albie, sit in the August sun and feel light-headed with lager and meat. Munich was going to be wonderful.

  But now Albie was gone, lost in Europe with a lunatic accordionist, and we two stumbled on in a daze of concern on her part, and guilt on mine. While Connie lay on the top bunk pretending to read, I stared out of the window.

  ‘He’ll probably have a much better time without us,’ I said, not for the first time. Not for the first time, there was no reply. ‘Perhaps I should call him anyway.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’ve told you. To apologise, chat. To check he’s all right.’

  ‘Let’s just … let’s just leave it be, Douglas. Yes?’ She switched off her light and the train moved on. Somewhere out there lay Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Wuppertal and Cologne, the German industrial heartland, the mighty Rhine, but all I could see were the lights on the Autobahn.

  89. margaret petersen

  My mother died shortly after our return from Skye, the first time a grave had opened up in my road of life. Another landmark, I suppose.

  It seemed that she suffered a stroke while sitting quietly at her desk during a biology class, and it took her ever-obedient pupils some time to respond and raise the alarm. My father rushed to the hospital only to discover that a further stroke had killed her while she lay on a trolley awaiting diagnosis. I arrived two hours later and watched as he responded with quite startling rage; at the bloody pupils who had remained stupidly in their seats, at the bloody teachers and hospital staff, at whoever was meant to be in charge of this whole life and death business. My mother’s death was ‘bloody stupid’, he said – she had been two bloody years away from retirement! Grief manifested itself as fury then indignation, as if there had been an administrative error, as if someone somewhere had fouled up and got the order of things wrong and he would have to pay the price by continuing to live on, alone. Men, alone; it just wasn’t right.

  I also grieved, and to a degree that surprised me, because it would be a distortion to claim that my mother and I were particularly close or affectionate. There had been moments, of course. She had always been a great nature-lover, and she’d soften in the country, become hearty and good-humoured, identifying the trees and birds with little trace of her classroom manner, offering me her arm, telling stories. Back at home, though, she was a reserved and rather conservative woman. Observing other mothers at the school gates, I wondered why she wasn’t warmer, brighter, a corrective to my father’s sternness. But then perhaps that was their secret. Perhaps they were a perfect match, like a pair of drumsticks.

  Yet there seemed to be no easy correlation between the awful grief I felt at her death and our closeness – or lack of it – in life, and it occurred to me that perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost. As consolation, I had Connie now, who was a wonder throughout all of this, from that first emergency phone call through the arrangements and preparations, the funeral, the packing away of clothes, trips to the charity shop, the mournful administration of bank accounts and wills, the sale of a house now too big, the purchase of a little flat for Dad. Though Connie and my mother had never got on, had fought openly on more than one occasion, she recognised the irrelevance of this and was present and respectful; affectionate but not cloying or melodramatic or indulgent. A good nurse.

  My mother was buried on a December morning, my parents’ house – now my father’s house – cold and dark when we returned and pushed the single beds together once again. Connie took off her funeral dress and we lay beneath the covers holding hands, knowing that there would be three more of these funerals along the way, four if her errant father ever resurfaced, and we would get through them together.

  ‘I hope you don’t die before me,’ I said, which was mawkish I know, but permissible in those circumstances.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she replied.

  Anyway, the weeks passed, the sympathy and condolences were offered and accepted, the salty tingling sensation behind the eyes ceased and over time I lost that special status that the bereaved acquire, was returned to my civilian state and we continued on our way together.

  Twenty years later, Connie’s step-father remains in good health, her natural father too for all we know. Shirley, Connie’s mother, shows every sign of being immortal, a living testament to the life-giving properties of tiny hand-rolled cigarettes and rum. Smoked and pickled, it appears she will go on forever and perhaps Connie won’t need me after all.

  90. thank you and goodbye

  In Munich I got the hotel exactly right for once; a pleasant little family-run place near the Viktualienmarkt, comfortable, unpretentious, quaint but not kitsch. An elderly lady of the type that gets eaten by wolves was there to open the door for us.

  ‘What about our other guest? Mr Albie …?’

  I felt Connie stiffen next to me.

  ‘Our son. He couldn’t make it, I’m afraid.’ Couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear it. I’d like to apologise for my son …

  ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ said the lady, frowning sympatheti-cally. ‘And I am sorry that we cannot refund at such late notice.’

  ‘Danke schön,’ I said, though I don’t know why. Danke schön and auf Wiedersehen were the only words of German I knew, and so I was doomed to spend our time here thanking then leaving.

  Even though official check-in was not for several hours we were shown to our room, which was pleasant in a Brothers Grimm way, over-filled with rustic Bavarian furniture of a kind I hoped Connie would like, old and rather sinister. But she hadn’t slept well on the train and so lay down on the immense bed, curling up her body in that girlish manner that she still has sometimes. ‘Very thin pillows in Germany,’ I observed, but she had closed her eyes so I sat in a rocking chair, poured some water and read up about Bruegel. The rim of the glass smelt rather musty, but apart from that, everything else was tip-top.

  91. the land of cockaigne

  There are an awful lot of Brueg(h)els, a mystifying array of Jans and Pieters, Elders and Youngers, and matters are not helped by their lack of flair when it came to picking Christian names.

  But of the dynasty, Bruegel the Elder – note the missing ‘h’ – is the original and best. There are only forty-five paintings or so in existence and one of the most famous is in the imposing Alte Pinakothek, which we visited that afternoon. There were plenty of pleasant Jans and Pieters along the way, vases of flowers and country fairs full of tiny detail, the kind of paintings that make fine jigsaws, but the Bruegel with no ‘h’ was something else entirely, hanging with little fanfare in an unprepossessing room. Das Schlaraffenland depicts a mythical ‘land of milk and honey’ – a roof tiled with pies, a fence made of sausages and, in the foreground, three bloated men: a soldier, a farmer and some sort of clerk or student, surrounded by half-eaten food, trouser flaps undone, too stuffed and bloated to work. It’s one of those ‘disturbing’ pictures – a live pig running around with a knife in its back, a boiled egg with little legs, that kind of thing – and I knew enough about art to spot an allegory when I
saw one.

  ‘Eat smaller portions.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Connie.

  ‘The meaning. If you live in a land where the roofs are made of pies, learn to pace yourself. He should have called it Carbs at Lunch.’

  ‘Douglas, I want to go home.’

  ‘What about the Museum of Modern Art?’

  ‘Not to the hotel. Home to England. I want to go back there now.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ I kept my eyes fixed on the painting. ‘They’re dropping like flies!’

  ‘Shall we … shall we sit down somewhere?’

  We walked into a larger room – crucifixions, Adam and Eve – and sat some way apart on a leather bench, the presence of the museum guard adding to the mood of a particularly difficult prison visit.

  ‘I know what you were hoping. You thought maybe if things went well, we might still have a future. You were hoping to change my mind, and I want you to know that I’d love to be able to change my mind too. I’d love to know for certain if I could be happy with you. But this isn’t making me happy, this trip. It’s … too hard, and it’s not a holiday if you feel chained to someone’s ankle. I need some space to think. I want to go home.’

  I smiled through the most terrible disappointment. ‘You can’t abandon the Grand Tour, Connie!’

  ‘You can keep going if you want.’

  ‘I can’t go on without you. Where’s the fun in that?’

  ‘So come back with me.’

  ‘What will we tell people?’

  ‘Do we have to tell them anything?’

  ‘We’re back from holiday twelve days early because our son has run away! It’s humiliating.’

  ‘We’ll … pretend we got food poisoning, or some aunt died. We’ll say Albie went off to meet friends, do his own thing. Or we’ll stay at home and close the curtains, hide, pretend we’re still travelling.’

  ‘We won’t have any photographs of Venice or Rome …’

  She laughed. ‘Never in the history of the human race has anyone asked to see those photos.’

  ‘I didn’t want them for other people. I wanted them for us.’

  ‘So … maybe we’ll tell people the truth.’

  ‘That you couldn’t stand another minute here with me.’

  She slid along the bench and pressed her shoulder against mine. ‘That’s not the truth.’

  ‘What is, then?’

  She shrugged. ‘The truth is that maybe this wasn’t the best time to be in each other’s pockets.’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘It was, but that was before … I’m sorry – you’ve arranged it all, I appreciate the effort, but it’s also … well, an effort. It’s too much to take in. It’s too confusing.’

  ‘We won’t get any money back, everything’s pre-booked.’

  ‘Maybe money’s not the most important thing at the moment, Douglas.’

  ‘Fine. Fine, I’ll look into flights.’

  ‘There’s a plane to Heathrow at ten fifteen tomorrow. We’ll be home by lunchtime.’

  92. schweinshaxe mit kartoffelknödel

  And so passed our last day in Europe together.

  We walked the remaining rooms of the gallery but, without Albie to educate, the Grand Tour seemed redundant now. Our eyes skimmed over Dürers, Raphaels and Rembrandts, but nothing registered and there was nothing to say. Before long we returned to the hotel and while Connie packed and read, I walked the streets.

  Munich was a strange combination of grandly ceremonial and boisterously beery, like a drunken general, and we might all have had fun here together, I suppose, on a balmy August night. Instead I went alone to a vast beer hall near the Viktualienmarkt where, to the accompaniment of a Bavarian brass band, I tried to raise my spirits by ordering a lager the size of a torso and a roasted ham hock. As with much in life, the first taste was delicious, but soon the meat took on the quality of a gruesome anatomy lesson as I became aware of the muscle groups, the sinews, bone and cartilage. I pushed the thing away, defeated, drained the pail of beer and stumbled back to our hotel bed where I awoke a little after two in the morning, smelling of ham, a half-crazed desiccated husk …

  93. the fire extinguisher

  … because what had I given Connie, after all? The benefits for me were clear, but throughout our time together I had seen the question flicker across the faces of friends and waiters, family and taxi-drivers: what’s in it for her? What does she see that so many others have missed?

  It was a question that I was unwilling to ask her myself, in case she frowned and had no answer. I believed – because she had told me so – that I offered her some kind of alternative to the men she had known before. I was not vain, bad-tempered, unreliable, temperamental, I had no drug or alcohol issues, I would not steal from her or cheat on her, I was not married, bisexual or manic-depressive. In short, I lacked all the qualities that, from her teens into her late twenties, she had found irresistible. I was unlikely to suggest that we smoke crack, and though this seemed to me a fairly basic, entry-level requirement in a partner, it was at least one I could fulfil. Point one in my favour: I was not a psychopath.

  It was also clear to everyone that I loved her to a quite ridiculous degree, though devotion is not always an appealing characteristic, as I knew from experience. Then there was our sex life, which, as I have mentioned, I think was always more than satisfactory.

  She had always been interested in my work. Despite its frustrations, I retained my belief in scientific endeavour and I think she admired me for this. Connie always said I was at my most attractive when I talked about my work, and she’d encourage me to describe it long after she’d ceased to comprehend the subject matter. ‘The lights come on,’ she said. As the nature of my employment changed those lights flickered somewhat, but initially she valued the many differences between us – art and science, sensibility and sense – because after all, who wants to fall in love with their own reflection?

  More practically, I was practical; adept at basic plumbing and carpentry and even electrical wiring, and only once was I thrown across the kitchen. I could walk into a room and spot a load-bearing wall; I was a meticulous and thorough decorator, always sugar-soaping, rubbing down, always rinsing out my brushes. As our finances melded, I was diligent and thorough in ensuring everything was in place: pensions, ISAs, insurance. I planned our holidays with military care, maintained the car, bled the radiators, reset the clocks in spring and autumn. While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries. Perhaps these achievements sound drab and pedestrian, but they were in stark contrast to the flaky, self-absorbed aesthetes she had known before. There was a sort of mild masculinity to it all that, for Connie, was both new and comforting.

  More thrillingly, I was extremely reliable in a crisis – changing a tyre on the hard shoulder of the M3 at night and in the rain, aiding an epileptic on the Northern Line while others sat and gawped; everyday heroism of a very minor sort. Walking on the street I always took care to be nearest to the kerb and though she laughed at this, she liked it too. Being with me, said Connie, was like carrying a large, old-fashioned fire extinguisher around with her at all times, and I took satisfaction in this.

  What else? I think I offered my wife a way out of a lifestyle she could no longer sustain. The Connie Moore I’d met had been a party girl, always dancing on tables, and I think I offered her a hand down to the floor. She gave up the notion of making a living as an artist, for a while at least, and took to working in the gallery full time. It must have been hard, I suppose, promoting the work of others rather than producing her own, but her talent would still be there, she could always go back to it once we were settled, once her style of painting came back into fashion. In the meantime we still had fun, terrific fun, and there were dinners with friends and many late nights. But there were fewer hangovers, fewer dawn regrets, fewer mystery bruises. I was the safest of harbours, but I do want to emphasise that I could be fun, too. Not in a large group perhap
s, but when the pressure was off, when it was just the two of us, I don’t think there was anywhere we’d rather have been.

  A great deal of stress is placed on the importance of humour in the modern relationship. Everything will be all right, we are led to believe, as long as you can make each other laugh, rendering a successful marriage as, in effect, fifty years of improv. To someone who felt in need of fresh new material, as I did during that long, dehydrated night of the soul, this was a cause for concern. I had always enjoyed making Connie laugh, it was satisfying and reassuring because laughter, I suppose, relies on surprise and it’s good to surprise. But like a fading athlete, my response times had slowed and now it was not unusual for me to find the perfect witty comeback to remarks made several years ago. Consequently I had been resorting to old tricks, old stories, and I sometimes felt that Connie had spent the first three years laughing at my jokes and the next twenty-one sighing at them. Somewhere along the way I had mislaid my sense of humour and was now only capable of puns, which are not the same thing at all. ‘I fear the wurst!’ The joke had occurred to me in the beer hall, and I wondered if I might use it over breakfast. I would offer her a pale sausage, and when she refused I’d say, ‘The trouble with you, Connie, is that you always fear the wurst!’ It was a good joke, though perhaps not enough in itself to save our marriage.

  Yet undeniably there had once been a time when I made Connie laugh constantly, and when I became a father I had hoped to develop this amusing persona further. I pictured myself as a kind of Roald Dahl figure, eccentric and wise, conjuring up characters and stories out of air, our children dangling off me, their faces bright with laughter, delight and love. I never quite achieved this, I don’t know why; perhaps it was because of what happened to our daughter. Certainly that changed me, changed both of us. Life seemed a little heavier after that.

  Anyway, I don’t think Albie ever appreciated my lighter side. I did my best but my manner was queasy and self-conscious, like a children’s entertainer who knows his act is failing. I could remove the top of my thumb and put it back again but unless a child is particularly witless, this material wears pretty thin. And Albie had never been witless. When I put on funny voices to read a story, he became visibly embarrassed. In fact, when I thought about it, it was hard to recall if I had ever made my son laugh through something other than personal injury, and I sometimes wished Connie would tell him, ‘You might not appreciate this, Egg, but once upon a time your father used to make me laugh so much, so much, we’d talk all night and laugh until we cried. Once upon a time.’